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| Baboon at Multimedia University College garbage dump [Photo:courtesy] |
By Nicanor Ndiege
Love them or hate them, but it is true that the wild animals in our communities enrich our lives and represent a vital link to the natural world.
Today, we no longer depend on them for food or fur, and the notion that they exist solely to provide recreation and diversionary pleasures for our kind is discredited.
Our cities, towns and institutions have turned into safe havens that offer hospitality to this once-decimated population and Multimedia University College of Kenya (MMU) is not an exception to this.
A walk in this higher learning institution will offer you an opportunity to meet various wild animals like the warthogs, baboons, and monkeys eating peacefully without causing any havoc to students. Wild animals here viewed as the members of the living society to which the institution belong.
Here, the MMU community gets the opportunity of meeting these wild animals again after so many years of estrangement and unfamiliarity.
To wild animals, an opportunity is an opportunity. If we grow plants they like to eat or offer shelter in uncapped chimneys, that is fine with them and it is a guarantee to peaceful co-existence.
By viewing these wild animals as members of our community whose well being we have become urgently concerned with, we are encouraged to reject the idea that humans are the center of the living world and embrace the idea that we are a part of other living things.
In turn, this has enabled us to give a greater moral consideration to the animals and the environments that sustain us all.
But as our growing residential and commercial developments further displace wildlife by taking over their space; we are faced with resolving conflicts with wild animals.
Our lives are not likely to be ever free of conflicts with wild animals as there are isolated cases of wild life attack on students.
Jessica Kemunto, a second year student, was attacked by male Baboon when she was from the campus canteen forcing her to drop her mandazis for the creature to feast on.
Jessica thought that the Baboon was not going to harm her since some of them fear humans. She was shocked thus shocked when one came after her, that day.
